Small Victorian houses converted into shops sit right behind the city's downtown towers.
What Yorkville looks like
Yorkville runs from Bloor Street north to Davenport Road, between Yonge Street and Avenue Road. Small Victorian houses line the side streets. Most were converted into shops rather than torn down, and condo and office towers now rise directly behind the rooflines.
The old Yorkville Town Hall stood on Yonge Street until a fire destroyed it in 1941. Its coat of arms survives on the front of , a fire hall on Yorkville Avenue. Part of what later became the shopping centre was once Potter's Field, a burial ground the growing village of Yorkville had closed by petition in 1855. opened on the same ground in 1974 and closed in 2025.
sits on Cumberland Street. Rowhouses there were demolished in the 1950s to build the Bloor subway line, and a parking lot covered the ground until the city opened the park in 1994. Eleven small gardens trace the old property lines, including a grid of Scots pines and a slab of granite trucked down from the Canadian Shield.
Before the shops arrived, Yorkville was Toronto's hippie district. Joni Mitchell and Neil Young played its coffeehouses in the 1960s. Ontario MPP Syl Apps called the scene "a festering sore in the middle of the city." On August 20, 1967, Diggers leader David DePoe led about 300 people in a sit-in that blocked Yorkville Avenue to traffic, and fifty were arrested. The National Film Board documentary Christopher's Movie Matinée followed the same crowd the next year.
Once the subway opened, rents rose and the houses filled with shops instead. , built as a hospital in 1923, now houses Chanel. , now Yorkville Village, replaced eight more houses in 1976.
Films shot in Yorkville
The on St. Thomas Street held a scene for The Paper Chase in 1973. It held one for Chloe in 2009. The , at Bloor and Avenue Road, was used repeatedly for the Crave series Heated Rivalry in 2025. Its restaurant, Joni, hosted a post awards party scene. Its Presidential Suite became the apartment one hockey player lets his teammate move into.
Christopher's Movie Matinée, 1968
The National Film Board sent director Mort Ransen to Yorkville Avenue to document the neighborhood's hippie coffeehouse scene. He let the teenagers help make the film rather than only filming them. It includes their protest against Toronto Board of Control member Allan Lamport, staged as a sit-in that blocked the street to traffic on August 20, 1967. The Toronto press accused the crew of encouraging the protest rather than recording it, and the NFB recalled them to Montreal.
The Paper Chase, 1973
A hotel room study session for law student Hart and a classmate was filmed at the Windsor Arms during the production's shoot in the fall of 1972. The 1927 hotel closed in 1991 and was rebuilt as a condo hotel in the late 1990s, keeping its St. Thomas Street facade.
Chloe, 2009
The hotel's own account of its filming history lists Chloe among the productions that shot there. The Windsor Arms also hosted the founding of the Toronto International Film Festival in 1976.
What Yorkville can double for
Yorkville can stand in for a small, expensive shopping street built from converted 19th century houses with towers rising right behind them.
